Sounds of Precarious Labour: Acoustic Regimes of Transient Workers

这个项目调查了低工资的农民工在不稳定的劳动中所要求的公共、私人和有限空间的声音定位和控制。它关注的是多元文化城市国家新加坡周围不平等的声音和劳动力流动，在新加坡，华人占多数的人口严重依赖以穆斯林和低收入地区为主的资源，特别是在国内工作和建筑方面。最近的COVID大流行暴露并加剧了这种严重的不平等，政府制定的“黄金标准”健康管理方案在流动工人群体中突然和意外地重新出现感染。新冠肺炎第二波浪潮的核心是临时工的隐形和被忽视的地位，他们（缺乏）福利——一夜之间影响着所有新加坡人的生活——已经成为一场由国家演变为全球危机的转折点，并成为公众辩论的问题。在这里，声音世界——特别是在空间、代理和身份的电子和虚拟赌注中，在拥挤的旅馆和雇主合租的严酷隔离环境中——已成为移民保护自己的声音、隐私和代理的越来越重要的资源。从耳机天堂到社交媒体唱歌，再到封锁音乐会，以及通过语言排斥和声音监控（例如在家中维持“家务声音”）对环境进行声学约束，我的项目解决了急需审查的多个问题。我的主要研究方向是声音材料，用一种多感官人种学的视觉策略方法，挑战视觉决定叙事的主导地位（Bull & Back 2003）。除了显而易见的（比如歌曲作为治疗空间），我还研究了通过语言控制在家庭、工作场所和公共场所对移民社区的声音管制，以及在避难所（清真寺、教堂、非政府组织）的情感音景。我也考虑过社交媒体上对职场生活的音乐想象。我质疑关于移民、文化分裂、公民社会行动主义、技术和一体化的辩论，并采取交叉的方法来分析种族、性别、宗教、阶级、流动性和更广泛的地区政治的竞争弧线。在该地区之外，我的发现将与所有全球变化的社会有关，这些社会经济不平等是由移民变化和宗教紧张局势造成的。COVID对私人空间社会化及其健全映射的不平衡影响进一步加剧了这些不对称。这种交叉方法以声音研究（Steingo & Sykes 2019）为中心，通过询问声学制度、声音避风港和两者之间的所有矛盾空间，对情感和边缘化劳动的非殖民化理解。它探讨了干预主义战略，以建立结构化倾听和主动（重新）倾听的新途径，并为被忽视的听觉领域的劳动和平等问题的思考和决策做出变革性贡献，这些领域的关键重新评估不应被全面的COVID挑战所掩盖；相反，我的研究必然会整合对危机的积极反应。新加坡之所以被选为研究基地，是因为它的地缘政治：这个由第三代和第四代中国移民组成的富裕城市，被誉为东南亚的文化经济掮客，在国际资源的不对称交换中运作。在这里，“本地”的概念经常与“国家”或“世界”混为一谈。然而，全球化的另一面是低薪移民工人的幽灵人口。我的项目为这个看不见的世界发声，是揭露亚洲多元文化主义的反叙事不可或缺的一部分，在亚洲，系统性的不平等加剧了新冠疫情对（不）安全空间（隔离、监控、排斥、强制融合）的灾难性影响。

This project investigates the sonic staking and regimenting of public, private and liminal spaces claimed by low-wage migrant workers in precarious labour. It focuses on unequal sonic and labour flows around the multicultural city-state of Singapore, where a Chinese-majority population draws heavily upon the resources of a primarily Muslim and lower-income region, particularly in domestic work and construction. This stark inequality has been exposed and exacerbated through the recent COVID pandemic, which has seen 'gold-standard' health-management protocols set up by the government upturned in a sudden and unexpected resurgence of infections among transient worker populations. At the heart COVID's second wave is the invisibilised and overlooked status of transient workers, whose (lack of) welfare - impacting overnight on the lives of all Singaporeans - has become a tipping point in a national-turned-global crisis and issue of public debate. Here, sounded worlds - particularly in electronic and virtual stakings of space, agency and identity amid harsh quarantined environments of packed hostels and employer-shared housing - have become ever more important recourses for migrants in safeguarding their voices, privacy and agency. Researching phenomena from earphone havens to social media singalongs to lockdown concerts and the acoustic disciplining of environments via language exclusion and sonic surveillance (eg maintenance of 'housework sounds' across the home), my project addresses multiple issues in urgent need of scrutiny. My chief investigatory path targets sonic materialities, with an ocular-strategised approach to multisensorial ethnography that challenges the dominance of visually-determined narratives (Bull & Back 2003). In addition to the obvious (such as songs as therapeutic spaces), I look at the sonic regimenting of migrant communities through language control in homes, workplaces and public spaces, as well as affective soundscapes in places of sanctuary (mosques, churches, NGOs). I also consider musical imaginaries of worker-life on social media. I question debates on migration, cultural cleavage, civil society activism, technology and integration, and take an intersectional approach to analysing competing arcs of race, gender, religion, class, mobility and broader regional politics. Beyond the region, my findings will be relevant to all globally shifting societies where socio-economic inequalities borne of migratory changes and religious tensions loom. These asymmetries have been further intensified by COVID's uneven impact on the socialisation of private spaces and their sounded mappings. This intersectional approach pivots on sound studies (Steingo & Sykes 2019) and decolonised understandings of affective and marginalised labour through interrogating acoustic regimes, sonic havens and all ambivalent spaces in between. It explores interventionist strategies in building new pathways for structured listening and active (re)sounding, and makes transformative contributions towards thinking and policy-making on labour and equality in neglected aural realms whose critical reevaluation should not be overridden by blanket COVID challenges; rather, my research necessarily integrates active responses to the crisis. Singapore as fieldsite has been chosen for its geopolitics: hailed as the culturo-economic broker for Southeast Asia, this wealthy city of third-and fourth-generation Chinese immigrants operates on asymmetrical exchanges of international resources. Here, notions of 'local' are often conflated with 'national' or 'cosmopolitan'. However, on the flipside of this globalism are ghost populations of low-paid migrant workers. My project gives voice to this invisibilised world and is integral to uncovering sounded counter-narratives of multiculturalism in Asia, where systemic inequalities have escalated the catastrophic impacts of COVID on (un)safe spaces (quarantined; surveiled; excluded; forcefully integrated).